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02/02/2015

~ Bacon & Jalapeno-Cheddar French Bread Snacks ~

This ends 'super-easy week' on Kitchen Encounters -- a week of super-easy recipes for your Superbowl party. Surely you've noticed everyone serves easy snacks for the Superbowl -- I am no exception. What I like least about the Superbowl is that it is played on a Sunday. The NFL gives no consideration to people like me who are obligated to entertain, then, get up and face the workweek the next morning. I've often wondered what the absentee rates at workplaces are the Monday after Superbowl Sunday. If anyone "knows someone that knows someone" would you please make arrangements to declare the day after this football game a holiday.

My 2015 game day menu stuck strickly to the ever-popular Tex-Mex theme:

I posted ~ January "White Out" White Chicken 'n Corn Chili ~ and~ Super-Sunday Spud Skins of the Taco Tater Type ~. One is chicken, one is beef, both are hearty. As a dessert option, I even shared the easiest cake recipe known to mankind ~ A Sweet Cream Cake: A Dream of an Easy Cake ~.

I planned to stop there, until I opened my refrigerator -- full of odds-and-ends ingredients: green onions, jalapenos, sour cream, and, lots of cheddar. I even had a loaf of leftover French bread from my weekly KE & WHVL-TV shoot on Thursday. I made ~ Pan-Seared Flat-Iron Steak Slider-Sandwiches ~, it aired yesterday, and, it too was about the Superbowl. Just click on the Related Article links below to get all of these recipes.

French bread pizza is one of the newest oldest tricks in the KISS Book of Entertaining (Keep It Simple Stupid). Making pizza on French bread was made famous in the 1960's by Bob Petrillose, the founder of the legendary Hot Truck on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His experiment not only spread like wildfire, it was eventually licensed to Stouffer's. After that, it quickly made its way into home kitchens nationwide -- mine being one of them.

Using other breads to make this type of super-easy snack pizza (bagels, English muffins, pita and naan) was a hop, skip and a very short jump for me. My husband and sons loved pizza made on all of them. It wasn't long before I started topping French and other breads with ingredients that, while pizza-esque in theory, had nothing to do with classic-type pizza at all.

This version was one of my family's favorites, and, on more than one occasion we five feasted on them them for dinner. They go great with a salad and/or a bowl of chili.

That said, my favorite bread to use for pizza-bread and pizza-bread-type snacks (crostini too), is the French batard. The batard, the first cousin to the baguette, weighs about 8-ounces, is shorter, plumper, and, slightly denser than Italian loaves (like ciabatta), so, it provides the best texture for all sorts of toppings. Use what you like as long as it is rustic and firm textured. Soft breads and soft-textured hoagie or sub rolls ? Don't do it.

Our family calls these bread snacks "Texican Pizza Bread".

2, 8-ounce, 12" long French batards, sliced in half lengthwise. (Note: When baked and sliced, each half will yield 6 snacks, for a total of 24, 4-5-bite snack breads.)

1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder (Note: I do not use fresh garlic in recipes such as this because once put in the oven, these snack breads do not bake at a high enough temperature to cook the garlic to a softened state, rendering it raw-ish and harsh tasting in the finished product.)

Cook's Note: If I had been in need of one more appetizer, I would have choosen one that complements my menu and contains seafood. That would be ~ Jesse's Bacon-Wrapped Dijon-Shrimp Appetizers ~. You can find the recipe in Categories 1, 11, 14 or 17!